Who's fault is it? Lawrence or Technology?

Everybody talks about the Lawrence difference, usually referring to something about the many different personalities and lifestyles that can be found all over campus. But another aspect of the Lawrence difference involves the intense homework that all Lawrentians must complete. To many students by 8th or 9th week, there is a sense of having to be productive at all times. Because there seems to never be enough time to get everything completed in time if you are not always being productive in some way.

My thought is this: Many people say that our generation is very technology dependent. As Rosen mentioned last week in his iDisorder talks, people are more likely to play around on their phone while waiting than simply sitting there in silence. Is this because they are bored? Or, like Lawrentians, have young adults become so preoccupied with making the most of their time, that it is completely unnatural to simply sit without being productive in some way?

So, society has become a very go-go-go atmosphere, for a variety of different reasons, which possibly has led to people becoming more unable to wantingly sit without some sort of stimulation. In order to do what would make themselves "happy", people have become dependent on technology to give them their wanted stimulation.

So has technology or society been the reason that people have changed? Or has technology simply been the medium through which people have changed, but not the actual reason? I think these are interesting questions that people will have different answers for a long time.

Lanier-->Is the Self what YOU want?

Many people, including Bellah, argue that America is becoming more individualized, relying on satisfying one's inner self. There have been strong arguments that technology seems to be helping in pushing people to become more individualized and self-reliant. New platforms, like Google or Amazon, help people to find information about what other people are thinking without actually having to have face to face conversations. But not everybody thinks that technology is helping people become more reliant on the self.

Jaron Lanier's book "You Are Not a Gadget" looks at how technology has influenced people to become not reliant on the self, but rather reliant on what technology says about certain things. For example, in a Ted talk (check it out at the 18:20 mark), Lanier suggests that new technology designs are most effective at self-confusion. We confuse what we really want to fit in with the technology design. He is concerned with the fact that people are letting algorithms recommend friends, movies, and music for us, rather than making decisions about social categories for ourselves.



So Lanier is suggesting that technology is influencing the self, making the community have a larger influence on personal decisions than the actual self. In "You Are Not a Gadget" Lanier makes several key points about what effect current technology can have on people, including this quote about the effects society can have on the decisions of the self.

"Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors.This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly unconstructive online world." (pg. 19-20)


Technology superpowers like Google have as their goal to be able to tell what people want based on previous searches and what is popular among other people. This is what Lanier referred to as the crowd, and it deemphasized individual humans because people would would accept what Google offered them was what the majority of the community bought as well, so it must be a good product.

The Internet Disorder

While I was unable to attend the iDisorder presentation by Larry Rosen, I find it very interesting that he has done so much quantitative data on this subject. It is almost like he is using Google's philosophy/technique of deciding whether users like their new products, by using hard data. Google shows new features to some users, and lets the raw data determine whether they decide to implement the new feature or not.

 










Similarly, Rosen used experiments to explore how dependent people were on their electronic devices and social networks. Most notably his experiment where he put people in a room with their phones on the table and made them "wait" for an hour. His data showed that people were likely to go on their phones durng that hours. So his data showed that people are becoming dependent on devices that Google has proven, with data, that people would like and would use often.

My point is that Google followed a scientific system that has worked for ages, and now Rosen is using that same system to prove that people are dependent on Google. So I guess following the cold hard facts will lead you to success.

Rally the Troops!

Most writers/journalists have a point of view that is portrayed in their writings. This is especially true in newspapers, magazines, and as the world becomes more technologically advanced, blogs. While all writings have a point of view, the most popular theme in many writings is trying to motivate people to get involved in a particular cause.

"Small Change" is an article in the New Yorker that compares the strong ties of  personal motivation compared to the weak ties of impersonal motivation, such as via facebook or twitter. Gladwell discusses that strong ties actually produce results, using the example of hte Woodwarth sit-in in the mid-1900s. The four African American friends stuck together in a personal way, which caused their friends to join, and then their friends, and so on. However, the weak ties/friendships that are a result of facebook or twitter do not produce as strong of results because the connection is not as strong. People do not feel compelled to join a cause because they have no personal connection to it. Gladwell calls all of the weak ties that are a result of twitter and facebook a network. There is a lot of people, but not as much individual involvement.

The Egyptian chronicles blog  gives updates on news stories that appear to be unfaithfully reported by the government controlled news. This blogger also puts their perspective on these stories, implying to their readers that they should be out there, involved in some way with the revolution. She also gives the illusion that there are a lot of people out there fighting for the cause right now, and anybody who is reading her blog should join them. Gladwell would suggest that, even though she isnt using facebook or twitter, the Egyptian chronicles blog is a form of weak ties,and while many people may read her blog, there isn't as much action. While I do not know what exactly is going on in Egypt right now, according to this blog, there are many people who are reading her blog and using that as motivation to get out there and fight for the cause.

Facebook and Privacy

Facebook has been dealing with issues of privacy since its beginning. People want to share information with friends, but they don't want the whole world to know about any details of their personal lives. Zuckerberg's main intention with creating facebook was to create a social network where people could have virtual relationships with people. In "The Social Network," one of the uses of facebook that Zuckerberg suggested was to see if people were in a relationship or not, or to get some background information on a blind date.

Last year, Consumer Reports came out with a review regarding Facebook and their privacy issues. One of the most surprising things that this article points out is that Facebook collects data anytime you visit a Facebook page. For example, anytime a person visits a site with a Facebook "like" button, Facebook knows about it. It doesnt matter if you are logged in to facebook or not, they still know that you visited that site.This can help them with targeting for advertisements.

Also slightly nerve-racking about Facebook and their privacy settings is that a friend of your friend can see some of your information without your knowledge or approval. It doesnt matter if you have the restricted settings on or not, they can still see the information.

Some people may not think this is a big deal, but it makes it easier for ID thieves steal identities of people who have specific information on their facebook page. Plus its just plain creepy. You don't really know who is visiting your profile page. There could be creepers, stalkers, and criminals who know everything about you, and sneak up and steal something from you without you having any clue.

So many people use facebook without realizing how unsecure it really is, and it is important for people to be aware and to perform necessary actions to take care of themselves and their identities.

Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs

After viewing “The Social Network”, the movie about the beginning of Facebook, there was a striking resemblance between Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. Both men showed such strong dedication to their respective companies, but they both also had this feeling that they were above everybody else, including the law.

 Steve Jobs started Apple with Woz, but when they came to a disagreement about where the future of Apple should go, Jobs did what he had to do to make sure that he stayed in control of Apple. Whatever happened to Woz happened, but Apple was going to stay on the path that Jobs had envisioned. According to “The Social Network”, Zuckerberg was also as determined as Jobs to make sure that Facebook continued on his envisioned path. He ignored the fact that he stole the idea from the twin brothers from Harvard, and he ended up diluting Eduardo’s shares. Both of these actions resulted in lawsuits that Zuckerberg would clearly lose.

Jobs and Zuckerberg’s personalities were also very similar. Both were awkward men who said what they thought, most of the time without thinking about how it would affect somebody. This is evident in the many instances where Jobs shouted how one of his employers ideas sucked. In the opening of “The Social Network”, Zuckerberg is on a date with Erica Albright. He says some very harsh things to her, but doesn’t understand why she is reacting with such anger. After she breaks up with him, Zuckerberg proceeds to blog about her, again saying some mean things.

 Both men give off this attitude that they can do or say whatever they want because they know that they are smarter than the average person. Zuckerberg is an excellent programmer, and Jobs has been putzing with computers all of his life. They emit this snotty personality, and many people who do not know them personally take it very offensively.

The main difference between these two men is their motivation for beginning their respective companies. When Jobs saw what Woz had created, his main intention was to find a way to make money from it. He wanted to sell it. Zuckerberg had a different motivation that is more similar to Brin and Page from Google. He wanted to provide a service to people, a social network for people to connect with other people. He didn’t want ads to clutter the page, to alter the users experience. Brin and Page wanted to create a way to search for things on the internet; a search that gave the most popular results and was the easiest for the searcher to use.

Zuckerberg and Jobs have many of the same personality characteristics, but I think their main difference is their motivation. Because they have very similar personalities, they therefore have similar ways of running a business, but their one glaring difference is why Facebook struggled in creating revenue in the beginning, while Apple had revenue from selling their products immediately.

So how does this relate to the ideas of religion? Jobs was more worried with creating revenue, creating products he could sell to individual people. These ideas support the concept of the self. Whereas Zuckerberg was more focused on creating a social network for people, rather than focusing on how to make a profit. He created a virtual community. While Jobs created products for the self, Zuckerberg created a product for the community.

Perfection and Meditation

"The Information" by James Gleick discusses what information really is, if it is really computable, and if, hypothetically, there was a machine that could be created to do all of the possible computing with any given numbers. In order to solve this problem, Alan Turing did something never before considered. He created a machine that had ideal powers, but only existed in his own mind.

And that is what I want to focus on in this post. How Turing basically answered important information-related questions that mathematicians had long been considering, with a machine that only existed in his mind. This would require Turing to have a very focused and logical mind. This idea of being able to focus one's mind to one particular subject also occurs in different religions, especially religions involving meditation.

Buddhist meditation is a classic example of meditiation for enlightenment, or understanding the nature of things. I think this can be similarily correlated with what Turing did regarding information. Followers of Buddhism use meditation to pursue understanding of the nature of the world, meaning they have to be very focused. Turing created a machine in his own mind, requiring him to be very focused on his theories.

Also interesting was Shannon's idea about cryptology. His goal was to create a coding system that was impossible to decode without a certain key. He was able to prove that a perfect coding system was possible, but that to be perfect, that encoding something was basically useless because the receiving end would not be able to understand the code either.

I think that this point can relate to Christianity in the following way. God did not create people to be perfect, so there are no perfect people. This allows people to have emotions. If everybody was perfect, there would be no sadness or fear, meaning that there would be no reason for people to truly feel happy or joy. So in reality, perfection in people would be useless, just as Shannon found perfection in a coding system useless because it would have no real purpose.

Google Takes over the World

So I was looking through the about Google pages that nobody realizes was at the bottom of the Google homepage. And under one of the hyperlinks was a passage labeled "What we do for you." Basically, it just explains how Google's main goal is to provide a perfect search engine, and that it has now expanded to offer actual products to try to make the user's life easier. But the last sentence of this explanation really hit me



"With all our technologies—from search to Chrome to Gmail—our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to find the information you need and get the things you need to do done."




So maybe you read that, and didn't really think there was anything wrong with that. And technically, in our current world, that is a completely normal sentence. But what really hit me was how technological dependent our world has become. Google has so many different technologies, including Chrome and Gmail. I remember in grade school, having to do science or social studies projects, and having to rely on the encylcopedias that were right next to our chicken soup for the soul books. We didn't even have a computer in the house to consider using the Internet.

Not only are the days of encyclopedias gone, but so are the days of calling family members asking how to do something at home, whether its calling mom on how to do laundry or calling grandma for that amazing recipe. Today everybodys solutions to these problems is to google it.

Google's way of working and knowing what people want is because it collects all of this data from the entire world. People dont have any idea that they are currently test subjects in some sort of huge Google experiment. Even worse, people have no idea how much Google currently knows about them. Personally, I think it would be very scary to consider if something would happen where Google would trade hands/be bought out by somebody else. Having so much information puts you in complete control, and if that control gets in the wrong hands, how many people would be in big trouble because of their reliance on the internet?

Following some of the great pictures regarding Google taking over the world, one of the sites provided 5 weapons that Google has that will eventually lead to it taking over the world. Whether its possible or not, the argument is relatively compelling. Check it out if ya got some time Google Taking Over the World